Introduction To Hill's Diary

More often than not, early Swedish immigrants to Oregon did not come directly
from Sweden, but moved west after having lived in other states for many years.
Many seemed to have been attracted by the milder climate and relocated from the
Midwest. This was the case for Samuel Magnus Hill (1851 – 1921), who had arrived
in the United States with his family as early as 1868, but who did not settle in
Oregon until 1915. Before arriving, Hill had spent most of his adult life at the
Swedish-speaking Luther College in Wahoo, Nebraska. In the late spring of 1901,
during his first and only trip back to his native country, Hill had made an
unsuccessful attempt to find a job in Sweden and relocate his family. Then,
following his 1914 retirement from Luther College, Hill instead moved west to
Oregon where he became the minister in a small Swedish settlement colony called
Carlsborg.

During the summer of 1914, the year before he moved to Oregon, Samuel Magnus
Hill started spending a great deal of time in front of his Swedish typewriter.
He typed up a large stack of old letters to and from relatives and friends in
Sweden and the United States, and he cleaned up the diary he had kept during the
family’s emigration in 1868. Hill also made a typescript of his journal from the
1901 trip to Sweden, and he typed up many of his poems and songs. In addition,
Hill composed two memoirs. The first he entitled: Biografi: Eller hvad jag
minnes ur mitt lifs historia [Biography: Or what I remember of my life’s
history], and it contains recollections from his life in Sweden prior to the
family’s emigration. The second he entitled Andra afdelningen. Hvad jag minnes
om mit lif i Amerika [Part Two. What I remember of my life in America]. None of
these approximately 400 manuscript pages (all of which were written in Swedish)
have been published before, even though some of the material in “Part Two” has
been quoted by James Iverne Dowie in his study Prairie Grass Dividing (1959).

Today it is impossible to know what was behind Hill’s sustained burst of
typing at age 63: Was it simply an enjoyable task in order to fill days suddenly
freed up by his unexpected retirement from Luther College? Or was it
preparations for an autobiography that was never completed, or an attempt to
preserve an easily read family record for his nine children? Whatever impetus
was behind Hill’s effort, one document remains an especially vivid and
interesting text today, and that is the diary he kept during the emigration. In
part it has to do with the classic Aristotelian structure of the narrative,
moving from a beginning (the native parish in Sweden) through a middle (crossing
the North Sea and the Atlantic) to an end (reaching a destination in the United
States). But the quality of the diary also has to do with the fact that Hill was
an intelligent and observant 17-year-old, and that the descriptions reveal many
of the tribulations that the emigrants had to face. The Hill family was part of
the early phase of the great migration from Sweden to the New World, and his
diary provides an informative glimpse into what such a journey entailed. In
addition, it is also very moving document because it turns out to be a tragedy –
the family’s first task after getting off the train in the small town of Altona,
near Galesburg, Illinois, was to bury August, the younger brother, who died just
four hours after their arrival.

The Hill family left Sweden during a time that saw increasing numbers of
emigrants departing for America. The main reason driving the exodus was clearly
to escape poverty. In 1868 Sweden was an agrarian society that had run out of
arable land, and industrialization and urban expansion had not yet grown to a
scale large enough to absorb a rapidly growing population. This made life
increasingly difficult for a large number of rural people. In addition, the
years 1867 – 68 saw widespread crop failures and even famine in some areas, and
this helped accelerate emigration even further. There had also been tensions
between the State Lutheran Church and various Christian revivalist movements
sweeping through Sweden, and this had already caused some people to emigrate.